The antebellum period was full of social reform movements based on the desire to eradicate evil and improve conditions humans in society. Despite attempting to address a wide variety of reforms to bring positive changes to society, these reform movements have met with varying degrees of success. This essay will focus on five of the major social reform movements of this era, discussing their achievements, failures, and impacts on America as a whole. These include abolition reforms, women's suffrage, temperance, institutional and educational reforms. The reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s were largely due to humanitarian reasons due to an Enlightenment period in the previous century that emphasized rational rather than irrational thinking, linking ideas about a responsibility to God and society to always improve. Christian morality, new ideas about freedom and human rights, economic changes, and, following the American and French revolutions, abolitionism contributed to efforts by both whites and blacks to end abolition. human slavery. The American Revolution fought for independence from Great Britain in the name of freedom and universal natural rights, in contradiction to the continuation of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison was a white New Englander who published an abolitionist weekly, The Liberator, in 1831. He believed that slavery was a sin and brought together Quaker abolitionists, evangelical abolitionists, and New England associates. England to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). ) in 1833. Its goal was immediate and uncompensated emancipation and equal rights for blacks. Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and the Grimke sisters were also notable leaders of the abolitionist movement; although the abolitionists were never so... middle of paper... totally crazy in the prisons and workhouses of Massachusetts. In 1843, she presented her findings to the Massachusetts legislature, and by 1860, twenty states would follow her advice to build new insane asylums and prisons. The institutional reform movement was successful in that twelve new prisons were built and sentences were less severe than before, but it failed to improve the treatment of criminals and the mentally insane. Institutions have become places of brutality and neglect. Penitentiaries forced their prisoners to do labor in solitary confinement, and they were severely punished if they disobeyed. Institutional reforms only slightly improved the plight of the mentally ill, which meant they were chained in basements, beaten, starved and naked, to being locked in a mental institution at the mercy of experimental doctors..